A fantastic coffee place in a majorly less than wonderful room.
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The Coffee Box is an Australian coffee chain.
The Darlinghurst Branch is in a thin sliver of a shoebox of a storefront on Oxford Street.
There are maybe six seats in the entire establishment.
Three of them are stools at a bar that comes off the wall when you lean on it.
Oxford Street is grungy the way that the Mission District in San Francisco is grungy.
There are nine million cheap microscopic eateries everywhere.
None of the eateries are nice places to sit.
This is the land that ambience forgot.
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But the coffee here is absolutely positively sensational.
For great coffee (or great food),
Samuel C will go just about anywhere and sit just about anywhere.
The drink I had was an Eskimo Coffee.
There is great dispute about just what Eskimo Coffee is.
The barista said it was just three shots of espresso and a ton of ice cubes.
Some recipes add milk.
Some recipes add sugar.
Some recipes add ice cream.
I am guessing this was just ground coffee, the milk, and the industrial quantity of ice cubes.
Intentionally some of the espresso is NOT the dissolved into liquid so it floats as a granular flavor accent on the top.
No matter how it was made, the drink was rock your socks.
One feature of the drink - which I think is also a feature of really good flat whites -
Is that the coffee is ground fine and the coffee is roasted dark.
This brings out a ton of coffee flavor at the expense of the taste of the roasting and the grinding dominating any subtle properties of the bean.
Subtle properties of the bean be damned.
I like my coffee punk rock.
This was serious punk rock.
My Eskimo Coffee was first rate ---
But given what made that drink first rate ...
I will bet their flat whites are pretty good too.
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I am looking forward to some serious coffee drinking in this town. read more